Neville Chamberlain Was Right

Nick Baumann is a senior editor in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Mother Jones.

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of
Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Chamberlain returned to
Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured "peace for our
time." Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man
who was wrong to try to "appease" Hitler—a cautionary tale for any
leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the
British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to
researchers. "The result of this was the discovery of all sorts of
factors that narrowed the options of the British government in general
and narrowed the options of Neville Chamberlain in particular," explains
David Dutton, a British historian who wrote a recent biography
of the prime minister. "The evidence was so overwhelming," he says,
that many historians came to believe that Chamberlain "couldn't do
anything other than what he did" at Munich. Over time, Dutton says, "the
weight of the historiography began to shift to a much more sympathetic
appreciation" of Chamberlain....